The Other Slavery (30 page)

The sparse conditions of the Great Basin limited the ability of the Paiutes to acquire horses. Horses consumed great amounts of grass, the very food on which the Paiutes depended for survival. Thus the Paiutes
ate
horses instead of keeping them as beasts of burden. As a result, unlike other Numic speakers such as the Utes and Comanches, the Paiutes remained a horseless people, moving on foot in small groups, carrying simple tools, and eking out a living by digging roots and catching animals. Without giving a second thought to the environmental constraints to which the Paiutes were subjected, newcomers to the Great Basin
simply assumed that the local Indians were exceedingly backward: “They are an anomaly, apparently the lowest species of humanity, approaching the monkey,” opined William Wolfskill, one of the earliest American trappers to behold Paiutes during a visit to the Great Basin in 1830. He also noticed how these Indians fed “like cattle”; communicated mostly through songs, as they knew but few words; and did not possess hatchets or any other instruments to cut even the softest wood. Such views endured for decades. Even Mark Twain later pronounced the Indians of eastern Nevada to be “the wretchedest type of mankind,” adding that “from what we could see and all we could learn . . . our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo or Norway rat, whichever animal-Adam the Darwinians trace them to.”
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The Utes and Paiutes may once have had similar ways of life, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, the large equestrian bands of the Colorado Plateau and the small bands of the Great Basin had diverged dramatically. Varied environmental constraints, long-term cultural adaptations, and the dispersal of horses out of New Mexico created two entirely different societies living within striking distance of each other. And that difference brought opportunity. Ute horsemen rode down the Wasatch Mountains and preyed on the Indians of the basin below. To them, procuring Paiute slaves may have seemed like a specialized kind of hunting. They would ride into the Paiute camps and intimidate parents into surrendering their children or husbands into giving up their wives. According to later testimonies, the Utes preferred to conduct these raids in the spring, when the Paiutes were starving and at their most vulnerable. Occasionally the raiders would even offer an old horse as payment—a negligible compensation that nonetheless allowed the Ute traffickers to present the transactions as “voluntary.” All over the Americas, slave catchers claimed as much, when in fact such transactions often amounted to outright kidnapping or were involuntary sales conducted under extreme conditions of starvation or duress.
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At the sight of approaching intruders, Paiute women and children hid. Only old men, the least likely to be enslaved, ventured out to meet outsiders. The Spaniards who first journeyed into Paiute country in 1776 remarked on their extreme timidity. “It pained us to see them frightened
so much that they could not even speak,” wrote Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, the diarist of the expedition, as they traversed what is now Beaver County in southwestern Utah. The passing Spaniards had to exert themselves greatly to catch one of these fleeing Indians. The momentary prisoner was “overly vivacious and so intimidated that he appeared to be out of his mind. He stared in every direction, watched everyone closely, and any gesture or motion on our part startled him beyond measure.” On another occasion, the friar and his companions spotted five Paiute Indians. When the visitors turned toward them, four of them hid, while one remained in sight but proceeded to climb a very large and difficult rock and would not come down. “At each step we took, as we came closer to him,” Fray Vélez de Escalante wrote, “he wanted to take off. We let him know that he did not have to be afraid, that we loved him like a son and wanted to talk with him. And so he waited for us making a thousand gestures to show that he feared us very much.” This first party of Spaniards referred to the local inhabitants as “coward Utes.” Yet against the background of slaving raids recurring year after year, such behavior was entirely rational.
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The Utes made the ferrying of Paiute Indians from the Great Basin into New Mexico a part of their seasonal movements. Mounted Indians procured slaves in the spring, moved about with them in the summer, and sold them at the New Mexican fairs in the fall, only to repeat the cycle the following year. The best evidence for this trade can be found in New Mexico’s parish records, especially those of Abiquiu, as historian Ned Blackhawk has observed. It is hard to tell much from these bare-bones entries. Maria Rosa Abeyta, a four-year-old “Ute” girl of unknown parents, was already at her baptism serving one Juan Antonio Abeyta, who appears as her sponsor, or godfather, in the records. María Gertrudis Gutiérrez, also of unknown parents, was introduced as a “genízara yuta,” whose godfather was Antonio Gutiérrez. Gertrudis Olguín, another “Ute” girl of unknown parents, was serving Juan Olguín when he took her to be baptized. Although these short entries lack individual detail, some things are obvious. First, in more than ninety percent of cases, the parents of Indian children specifically identified as “Ute” were unknown, which is what one would expect after multiple
transactions involving Indian and Spanish traffickers. In Spanish America, a society obsessed with lineages, the fact that the parents of all of these Native children were unknown is a strong indication that they arrived in New Mexico through the slave trade. Second, “godfathers” and “godmothers” were quite evidently the owners or masters of these children. In post-Reformation Catholic practice, godparents were responsible adults who took a special interest in the proper Christian education and upbringing of the children whose baptisms they sponsored. In cases in which parents died or went missing, godparents could even act as surrogate parents. But in New Mexico, the institution was adapted to legitimize the purchase of Indian captives, and with the scratch of a pen, a slaveholder became a respectable godparent.
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The term “yuta” in these church records requires some explanation. It almost certainly does not refer to Utes—who after all were at peace with New Mexico after the 1740s—but more broadly to Numic-speaking peoples. Some Utes may well have been enslaved in clashes with Comanches and Navajos. But the majority of those recorded must have been Paiutes, who were identified as “yutas” by New Mexicans for simplicity or perhaps to denote the ethnicity of the captors rather than the captives. These records also reveal the ups and downs of this trade. “Yuta” begins appearing in New Mexican parish records in the 1740s, just when the Utes and Spaniards forged a stable alliance. The Utes signed a formal agreement with New Mexico in 1752. From then on, the number of “yuta” captives climbed steadily through the second half of the eighteenth century and into the early decades of the nineteenth century, reaching a high point only in the 1840s.
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The opening of a trail linking New Mexico and California by way of the Great Basin gave additional impetus to the traffic of Paiute Indians. Using Abiquiu as a staging point, caravans of as many as one hundred New Mexican merchants and mule drivers headed west and north into Ute territory. After entering what is now the southeastern corner of Utah, these intrepid travelers had to ford the upper Colorado and Green Rivers, cross the Wasatch Mountains, and descend into the Great Basin via Salina Canyon. The Old Spanish Trail—as this challenging route became known—then veered south, passing through Las Vegas, across
the Mojave Desert, and over the San Bernardino Mountains, to end in Los Angeles. Although Spanish explorers had blazed portions of the Old Spanish Trail since the 1760s, it was only during the Mexican period that it became a major thoroughfare used in its entirety.
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The Old Spanish Trail forged closer ties between the Spaniards and Utes but also increased the potential for competition and conflict. We have only scattered glimpses of the fraught relationships that developed along the road—alliances that could shift at a moment’s notice from peaceful trade to violence. For instance, in the spring of 1813 a group of seven merchants led by Mauricio Arze and Lagos García departed from Abiquiu and journeyed as far north as Utah Lake, in what is now north-central Utah. They called out the surrounding Utes, letting them know that they wished to trade, and waited three days for them to assemble. The Utes were very interested in the Spaniards’ horses, but they would pay for them only with Paiute slaves—or so claimed Arze and García in their subsequent judicial depositions. When the New Mexicans requested other goods, many of the Utes became incensed, killing eight of the merchants’ mounts and one mule. Thanks to the intervention of one Ute leader, the Spaniards managed to collect the rest of their animals and leave without further losses. On their way home, by way of the Colorado River in southeastern Utah, Arze, García, and the others ran into the ranchería of Chief Wasatch (after whom the mountains running through the middle of Utah are named). Wasatch was waiting there to trade, “as was his custom,” and received the New Mexican merchants cordially at first. But when the Spaniards refused to exchange their horses for slaves, the Utes took offense and became hostile. In the end, the New Mexicans accepted 109 pelts and 12 slaves “in order not to receive another injury like the first one.” It is hard to know whether the Spaniards were as reluctant to acquire slaves as they said they were, but at the very least their story reveals that the Utes expected the Spaniards to accept slaves as a means of payment all over Utah.
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When Americans started trickling into the Great Basin, they found a deeply entrenched and fairly old slave trade conducted by both Utes and New Mexicans. Fur trapper Dick Wootton, a colorful figure widely known as “Uncle Dick,” marveled at how common it was during the
1830s to spot parties of Mexicans buying Indian slaves in Utah and admitted to doing business with them: “While we were trapping there I sent a lot of peltries to Taos by a party of these same slave traders, some of whom I happened to know.” New England explorer Thomas J. Farnham remarked that many of the slaving victims were Paiute and Shoshone Indians living on the Sevier River of Utah—“poor creatures hunted in the spring of the year, when they are weak and helpless . . . and when taken [they are] fattened, carried to Santa Fé and sold as slaves during their minority.” Farnham noted that all ethnicities were already involved in this trade: “New Mexicans capture them for slaves; the neighboring Indians do the same; and even the bold and usually high-minded old [Anglo-American] beaver-hunter sometimes descends from his legitimate labor among the mountain streams, to this mean traffic.”
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One of the most detailed descriptions of this trade was penned by Daniel W. Jones, a veteran of the U.S.-Mexican War who drifted into New Mexico and in 1850 joined a sheepherding expedition bound for California. On the “down trip,” New Mexicans traded with Utes and Navajos along the way, giving them horses in exchange for children procured from “poorer Indians.” The sheepherders then took these children all the way to the Golden State, where they sold the captives and used the proceeds to acquire large herds of California stock. On the return trip, the New Mexicans once again engaged their Ute and Navajo suppliers, exchanging their newly acquired horses for more children, now destined for the New Mexican market. According to Jones, boys fetched an average of $100, while girls sold for between $150 and $200—“the girls having the reputation of making better servants than any others.” It would thus appear that by 1850, Indian and Mexican traffickers had found their proper places as two necessary links in the supply chain connecting Great Basin slaves with purchasers in California and New Mexico.
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The parallel stories of the Comanches and Utes underscore how the uneven spread of horses enabled them to prey on other Indians. It was not an entirely unprecedented occurrence. In pre-contact North America,
the diffusion of agriculture had given rise to an earlier cycle of enslavement. Indian societies that adopted agriculture experienced a sudden population increase and acquired both the means and the motivation to raid other peoples. The Aztecs, Mayas, Zapotecs, Caribs, Iroquois, and many others possessed captives and slaves, as is clear in archaeological, linguistic, and historical records. Nomadic groups also had slaves. But it is possible to find some nomads who were reluctant to accept even individuals who willingly offered themselves as slaves to save themselves from starvation. For some of these groups, taking slaves was simply not economically viable. I do not mean to paint a simplistic portrait of agriculturalist traffickers and nomadic victims. It is clear that different configurations were possible: large urban societies enslaving smaller ones, as in the case of the Aztecs and Tlaxcalans, or agricultural peoples enslaving groups that were still in the process of adopting agriculture. But the fact is that technological differences gave some groups the capacity and incentive to raid others.
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